Part 9 (1/2)

”We?” asked Rupert, and then, quickly, ”Of course, you and Hugh. Of course. How nice.”

Then Barbara had mentioned her boiler. ”It's rather awkward, though. I've got somebody coming to install a new central heating system in the flat. They insist on doing it next week, but I don't want to hand over the keys to people I don't know. I was hoping to get a friend to supervise to let them in and see that everything was in order. But I haven't yet ...” She stopped herself, realising what was coming next.

”But let us help,” said Rupert effusively. ”We're just round the corner, as you know, and since Gloria went freelance she's very flexible. Miss Flexibility herself, in fact. She could pop in and supervise things.”

”I don't want to ...”

”Look, it's not the slightest imposition. Gloria would love to help. Just give me a key and all will be fixed.”

Barbara knew that she should have resisted, but it was too late. She could hardly refuse this offer without appearing churlish and distrusting, and yet even as she handed over the spare key she understood what a profound mistake it was. Rupert had wanted her flat for years, and felt that he had a moral claim to it. And here she was handing over to him when it would have been so easy to prevaricate, or make an excuse. Could anything be more foolish? Or weak?

After he had left the room, she looked down at her desk and took a deep breath. It was absurd to be worry unnecessarily; there was nothing that Rupert could do. After all, one couldn't steal a flat could one?

Chapter 29: Rupert Scorns the Yeti Project.

Barbara made a conscious effort to stop thinking about Rupert and his wheedling ways. She had only another three hours in the office before she could leave for the next ten days, putting all thoughts of Rupert and the Ragg Porter Literary Agency out of her mind. These ten days would be spent in the company of Hugh Macpherson, her fiance, in the wilds of Argyll, staying in a cottage on his father's farm. It was a blissful thought, and Barbara allowed her mind to dwell on the delights that lay ahead. She would have Hugh all to herself; her companion, her plaything. She felt a frisson of antic.i.p.atory pleasure as she allowed herself to imagine moments of intimacy together; Hugh was attentive, the ideal lover, and made Oedipus Snark, with his hurried, insensitive ways, seem like a bad dream. Oedipus had not really felt anything for her, she now realised; he had stayed with her for several years simply because his vanity required that he have a partner. He had not loved her, and if she had persuaded herself that she loved him, then it was no more than wishful thinking and self-delusion.

She closed her eyes, allowing herself one final image of Hugh lying beside her, with the window open to the Highlands sky that in the summer was light even at eleven at night, and the scent of the sea loch that Hugh had explained lay just a short distance from the cottage; and she pictured herself getting up and looking down at Hugh, still asleep, and then crossing to the window and seeing the deer going down to the machair, that strip of gra.s.s between the sea and the land proper. She imagined all that, and then opened her eyes again and frowned, and began to dictate the final few letters that she had to give to her secretary before she left for this idyll with Hugh. She glanced at her watch: it was three o'clock. In seven hours they would be boarding the Fort William sleeper for the trip north; just seven short hours.

There was a letter to Errol Greatorex, the amanuensis who claimed to have written the autobiography of a yeti. Rupert had initially been scathing about this project, and was still somewhat dubious about Greatorex's credentials. ”Firstly,” he had said on one occasion, in that insufferably pedantic voice that he used when he wanted to explain what he thought was very obvious. ”Firstly, the very existence of yetis is doubtful. It's all very well producing photographs of giant footprints, but if these creatures existed, then surely we would have found skeletons, at the very least. Unless they're immortal, of course. There's always that possibility, I suppose. If they're like Zeus et al and the Himalayas are like Mount Olympus, then I suppose that we wouldn't find skeletons, would we, they having no mortal coil to cast off d'accord?”

He drew breath. ”Secondly, if abominable snowmen do exist, then it would be very unlikely that they would have the gift of speech, being some sort of sub-h.o.m.o sapiens primate. So how could this yeti have conveyed his experiences to your friend, Mr Greatorex? Somewhat unlikely, I would have thought. Correct me if I'm wrong, of course. Cela va sans dire.

”You have to be careful, Barbara. Literary frauds are always lurking in the undergrowth. Grey Owl look at him. Ojibway Indian I ask you! Archie Belaney from Suss.e.x, in actual fact. And how did his publishers and agents feel, I wonder? And that book, My Uncle Joe, about Stalin, by his nephew, except he wasn't Stalin's nephew at all. We're on well-worn ground here, Barbara, and I don't think that Ragg Porter should end up with egg all over its face.”

She had resisted Rupert's opposition to the project, and encouraged Errol Greatorex to produce a ma.n.u.script. So far four chapters had been written and had been submitted in a neat folder marked Yeti's Life Story, Confidential. She had taken these home one evening and had pored over them, so transfixed by the story that her soup had boiled over and burned, unnoticed.

”My earliest memory,” wrote the yeti, ”is of being taken by my uncle to a place just outside one of the high villages in a remote part of the country. There was a monastery outside this village, a square stone building with a commanding view of the valley below. I had never been in a proper building before we lived in small shelters, tents of a sort, that we disguised with snow. They were comfortable enough, but the sight of this monastery with its darkened windows and its high parapets made a great impression on my five-year-old self.

”I wanted to go into the monastery, but my uncle, with that natural shyness of our people, refused. 'They will not understand,' he said. 'That is part of their world, not ours.'

”I heard the monks chanting within, and the sound seemed to me to be beautiful beyond imagining. Yetis do not have any music of their own they have small singing bowls that they sometimes use to produce a single note, but I hesitate to call it music. Hearing the chants of the monks filled me with excitement. It seemed to me that I was being addressed, personally and directly, and that if I did not respond this mournful, moving sound would disappear from the face of the earth.

”My uncle, however, told me to be quiet, and so I said nothing, but crouched there with him, watching the monks going about their tasks, tending their struggling vegetables in the patches of raked earth they had prepared in front of the monastery.

”I had no idea that, six years later, I was to return here and be given the chance of an education. I had no idea, too, that some of the monks whom I had watched with such curiosity would come to mean so much to me. At that point they were just men in saffron robes, clutching hoes, scratching at the thin soil of the mountainside, behind them the prayer flags fluttering in the wind: blue, green, yellow, red colours that had until then been no part of our world, which knew only the white of the snow and the pale, singing blue of the sky above.”

Chapter 30: The Sleeper Train.

”That's our sleeper train,” said Hugh, pointing along the platform. ”See it?”

Barbara Ragg nodded, momentarily distracted by the sight of a group of staggering football fans being searched by a contingent of transport police before they were allowed on the platform. The search was being conducted in good spirits, it seemed, even though it was proving productive. At the side of the concourse was steadily growing a motley pile of bottles and cans, taken off the fans by the police. Barbara did not want to stare, but found it difficult to tear her gaze away. For a moment she was consumed with shame; where else in Western Europe could such sights be seen? Where else was public drunkenness so manifest? On the streets and in the cafes of France? She thought not; such places always had a light, civilised air, even if the statistics showed that the French consumed vast lakes of wine. But they drank it with food, while engaged in pleasant conversation, not like this. Nor, she imagined, did they have mobs of drunken young women, screeching hen parties, tottering in high heels and short skirts from bar to bar, fuelled by sweetened vodka concoctions. And in Germany? The Germans got drunk at beer festivals, in large tents, to the strains of oompah music again, all very different from this. And yet if you said anything about it to anybody, they merely shrugged, or smiled at you as if to imply that you were some sort of killjoy.

Hugh did not appear to have noticed. Perhaps, being Scottish, he was inured to such sights. ”I like sleepers,” he said, as they made their way down the platform. ”Do you?”

”I don't really think very much about them,” she said.

Hugh quoted Norman McCaig. ”There's a Scottish poet,” he said. ”He wrote a poem about the Edinburgh to London sleeper. He said something about not liking being carried sideways through the night. That's such a powerful image, isn't it? Being carried sideways through the night.”

Barbara agreed. ”Sometimes,” she said, ”when I look up and see an aeroplane overhead I think of all the people in it. All those people being carried in the sitting position through the air. If you just took the outer skin of metal away, imagine what it would look like. Rows of people shooting through the air.”

Hugh smiled. ”Yes, very odd. I think I probably prefer being carried sideways through the night to being carried through the air like that. One is less of a hostage to fortune when one is only a few feet off the ground, don't you think, rather than, what is it, four miles above it?”

”Five, I think.”

”Give me a train any time.”

Trains were normally of little interest to Barbara, except as a means of getting from place to place, but this one was different. At first, it seemed to her that it had no windows, that it was that curious thing, a sealed train, of the sort in which Lenin travelled from Switzerland to Russia; then she saw that there were windows, but they were rendered opaque by drawn blinds.

”I can hardly remember when I last took a sleeper train,” she said. ”As a teenager I did some travelling on the continent. We were in a wagon-lit, I think.” It was a hazy recollection: a vague memory of sounds, of being rocked through the night on the way down to Italy; the slightly acrid smell of sleeper carriages, a smell redolent of batteries and stuffiness, and slightly sour milk.

”I want to go on the Orient Express one day,” said Hugh as they neared their carriage. ”To Istanbul. I've always wanted to. It's such a romantic idea, isn't it?”

”I suppose so,” said Barbara.

”Shall we do it?” asked Hugh. ”Should I book?”

She laughed. ”Perhaps.” He had started to say we now, quite frequently, and she was still getting used to it. It touched her. Oedipus Snark had never said we; her life with him had never been a shared one. With Oedipus, it was always I.

They boarded the train. A woman with a clipboard, a diminutive woman with a strong Glaswegian accent, showed them to their compartments, two single-bed cabins with a communicating door between. For a moment Barbara felt a twinge of disappointment, but then asked herself what she had expected. Sleepers did not have double bunks, of course, because that was not the point of a sleeper. You were meant to sleep when on a sleeper as the name suggested.

The woman took their order for morning tea, which would be served, she said, just before they drew in to Glasgow. Then it would be on to Fort William, where they would arrive shortly after ten. Then, with a smile, she left them.

Barbara put her case on the rack, and then raised the window blind. As she did so, she caught sight of her blurred reflection in the blank gla.s.s of the window. I am on a train with my fiance, she thought. I am going to Scotland. I am with the most beautiful man I have ever met yes, he really is that and it is I, Barbara Ragg, who has him. He is mine. Mine.

It was an unexpected thought, a form of stocktaking in which we all engage from time to time. We contemplate our situation and say to ourselves, Here am I, doing this; me, of all people, doing this who would have thought? We ask ourselves how we got what we have got and why Nemesis does not yet appear to have noticed. It is not a matter of desert. It was not that now, at least in Barbara's case; for her it was more of a feeling of wonder that it had happened at all. It had not been in her script. It was not meant to be like this.

She turned round. Hugh was standing behind her.

”My darling, beautiful, wonderful Barbie,” he whispered.

The first part of this was fine; the latter not quite. He had never called her Barbie before.

She made light of it. She smiled. ”Barbie?”

He put his arms around her. ”Barbie. Well, its short for Barbara, isn't it?”

”Yes. But ... But do you know who Barbie is?”

Hugh looked puzzled. He planted a kiss on her brow. He was wearing some sort of cologne; there was the scent of sandalwood. ”No.”